Re: Delphi2005 BETA

From: Angra Mainyu (angra_at_nospam4me.com)
Date: 02/21/05 

Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 07:31:12 -0500

"Lauchlan M" <LMackinnon@Hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:4219486c@newsgroups.borland.com...
>
> ok, so it's not an MS problem then. I take it it's a matter of Borland
> either choosing to build a designer (and hence let Delphi use CF) or not.
>
> What is the primary problem with Borland building a designer? Is it more
> technical issues, cost, lack of required info, or the likelhood that they
> are trying to build for a moving target?
>

In October 2004 there was a long thread in this ng which discusses this
matter in some depth and contains the following message from Borland's
Michael Swindell which explains Borland's reasoning on why they haven't
invested the necessary resources to develop CF support,

A Google search on "news:4170255e$1@newsgroups.borland.com" will find a
message from Mark G. Zeringue Oct 16 2004, 6:26 am which is in response
to this message which, for some reason, is no longer visible, maybe it was
deleted...

From: "Michael Swindell (Borland)" <mswindell@borland.com>
Subject: Re: Delphi 2005 - Compact Framework Support? Couldnt find anything
in
the FAQ.
Date: Friday, October 15, 2004 3:30 PM

> The point that I have been trying to make is that without CF support,
> Borland will have a more difficult time attracting new users to the fold.

Semantically I agree with this statement, but in reality totally disagree. I
agree because yes certainly there are some organizations who are currently
planning CF development, and those users cannot consider our product for
those projects. However, Delphi 2005 addresses the top issues for
development organizations for the top 90% of their requiremetns. If you take
1000 Windows oriented development organizations of any segment and poll them
on what their developtment projects will be through the end of 2005, you'll
find that very few have plans to develop CF applications. If you project
that out past 2005 you'll find that # starts to increase considerably. But
in 2004 thru 2005 you will find that development teams are currently most
interested in

- How can I reduce the cost of maintaining existing applications
- How can I decrease the time to develop new applications
- How can I transition my development teams to .NET (ASP.NET ranks at the
top of this list)
- How can I migrate existing applications to .NET without tossing out my
investments
- How can I increase the collaboration and efficiency of my teams
(distributed and offshore teams ranks high in this list)
- How can I increase the quality of my development (decrease bugs)
- How can I reduce the complexity of developing for ADO.NET
- How can I reduce the amount of custom "application infrastructure" we need
to write in Enterprise applications

and individual developers are also interested in

- How can I be more productive on a minute-by-minute basis
- How can you make coding be more fun
- How can you make it easier for me to learn frameworks as I use them
- How can you help me catch bugs as I create them
- How can you help me write better code

These are the things we are addressing better than anyone in 2005, and why
many companies are looking at Delphi.

> It is interesting that last month Danny made the statement that 10 times
as
> many people approached him about CF support at Borcon than support for a
> native 64bit compiler.

Developers are very interested in PocketPC, many of us have them. But
interest and plans are different things. In order to deliver what really
most important for Delphi developers we have to look at what developers will
actually be producing with the tools we build, during the time the tool's
primary "product life". CF is getting there, but committed development plans
are quite there yet, not enough to knock other far more important features
off the list.

-Michael

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